When a print failure occurs due to a problem with the selected printing device, the sender of the print job typically must either remedy the problem with the selected printing device and reinitiate the printing process, or send the print job to another printing device in order to obtain a hard copy document.
Although the above-described process is viable, it can be frustrating in situations in which the source file was a temporary file to which the user no longer has access. For example, if the file to be printed was an email attachment that was appended to an email message that the user deleted after attempting to print the attachment, the user may no longer have access to the file and may, therefore, need to request that the sender of the email message resend the attachment so that printing can attempted on another printing device. To cite another example, if the file was a web page (e.g., a purchase receipt) that was accessed via a web browser that the user closed after attempting to print the web page, the user may need to spend time trying to re-access the page, assuming that the page can even be re-accessed in the first place.
The aforementioned drawbacks can be solved using what is referred to in the art as dynamic job rerouting. With such rerouting, a print job that cannot be printed by a first printing device for whatever reason (e.g., a mechanical problem or empty paper tray) is automatically rerouted to another printing device for printing. Although such a solution enables generation of a hard copy document without requiring the user to relocate the source file and manually reinitiate the printing process, the user has little or no control over the print job. Therefore, sensitive documents, such as those comprising personal or confidential information, may be automatically output by a printing device over which the user has little control and/or that is shared by many different persons. This can also result in the user losing the output, or having difficulty in finding it when the print job is rerouted to another machine in an unknown location.
In addition to the potential for the undesired sharing of sensitive information that dynamic job rerouting can cause, dynamic job rerouting can be difficult to achieve and may be prone to failure given the complexity associated with converting machine bits used to print on a first printing device to machine bits that can be used to print on a second printing device. Therefore, dynamic job rerouting may require significant resources to configure and maintain in addition to the potential high cost of additional hardware needed for this rerouting.